The Jimmer Jammer Stories by K. Fredette

I just wanted to give you a little history on them. This idea was first conceived when our son Jimmer was born back in 1989. My other son TJ was 7 at the time and when we brought Jimmer home, TJ was intrigued by the cheeks that Jimmer had and commented about them frequently. One day, because TJ knew that I liked to dabble in making different craft items, he said to me “Mommy you should make a doll that looks like Jimmer with his big cheeks, then you can call them ‘The Cheeksters’. Well at the time I just laughed and said it was a cute idea but didn’t really consider something like that until years later when Jimmer was about 5 or so and he still had those cheeks!

I decided to give it a try just for fun because I really enjoyed trying to create things. They first started out as a sock that I stuffed with cotton and drew a face on them. Then I decided that I wanted to put his big feet on them too so then the doll looked like a face with big cheeks and big feet (if you’ve seen Jimmer’s size 14 feet you’ll know why I wanted to add those on to the doll) and of course we used TJ’s idea for a name and called them The Cheeksters. The difference of how they looked back then and how they look now is how far I’ve come at perfecting them just the way I wanted them to look.

When we started we thought of 7 different characters. They were Jimmer Jammer, (of course for baby Jimmer), Talented TJ, Lovely Lindsay, Mischievous Michael, Sweet Suzy, Neat Ned, and Rapper Roberto, . When my son TJ was in high school and I had revisited the idea of trying to do something with the Cheeksters, I asked him to write a little poem that went along with each of those. Then we added Messy Marvin, Cool Calvin, Moviestar Monica, Curly Q Carla, and on and on. I probably have about 20 or 30 characters now and the sky is the limit with them.

Finally I decided to write a series of books about The Cheeksters. The main character is Jimmer Jammer and the title of the books will be called “The Jimmer Jammer Stories” with stories about the Cheekster characters. The stories will have a moral theme to it with Jimmer Jammer giving some advice to the young readers at the end. My son Jimmer didn’t even know that I was working on these books. He knew of the Cheekster dolls that I had all over the house during his growing years, but didn’t know about the books. I recently showed them to him. He approved and hopes that they do well.